On April 13, 2016, about one hundred elderly people assembled in front of a stone memorial plaque in a park in Tokyo's Toshima ward. Although their number has gradually diminished, they have been meeting on this day every year for more than two decades. Their purpose is to remember the victims of a massive firebombing raid that reduced three quarters of Toshima to ashes on the night of April 13-14, 1945. Most of them are now in their late eighties or early nineties, but they have vowed to continue to hold this meeting, the Nezuyama Small Memorial Service, for as long as they are able.

Nezuyama was the local name for a thickly wooded area to the east of Ikebukuro Station. During the war, four large public air raid shelters were built there. On the night of the air raid, hundreds of people fled from the fires to the shelters. The heat of the conflagration around Nezuyama was so intense that whirlwinds raged through the woods. The following morning, the bodies of 531 people who perished in the fires in the surrounding districts were temporarily buried in a field at the southwest corner of the woods. All that remains of Nezuyama is that space, now Minami-Ikebukuro Park, where they hold the memorial service every year.

After the war, Ikebukuro was developed into one of Tokyo's biggest commercial and entertainment districts. On August 13, 1988, an article in Asahi Shimbun mentioned that a large number of human bones had been found under Minami-Ikebukuro Park during construction of the Yurakucho subway line. According to one of the workers, because they were behind schedule, they simply purified the bones with salt and put them back in the ground. This shocking revelation was the trigger for a grassroots movement that led to the inauguration of the Nezuyama Small Memorial Service. The first service was held on April 13, 1995. In August of the same year, Toshima ward erected the memorial plaque for the victims.

Apart from the survivors, very few people remember the air raid of April 13-14, 1945. It is hardly mentioned in books on the bombing of Japan. The seven-volume official history of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) in World War II devotes just two sentences to it1, while the most detailed account of the firebombing of Tokyo gives it just five lines.2 However, in terms of the number of bombers deployed and tons of bombs dropped, this mission, codenamed Perdition #1,3 was the largest incendiary attack on Tokyo at that point in the war. The bare statistics are as follows: From 10.57 p.m. to 2.36 a.m. on the night of April 13-14, 327 B-29s dropped a total of 2,120 tons of incendiary and high-explosive bombs on Tokyo, burning out a total area of 11.4 square miles, destroying 170,546 buildings, leaving 2,459 people dead and 640,932 homeless.